Twice Through The Looking Glass
by SYN3
Summary: My first fanfic. This is only the beginning - I bashed this out quickly last night. It's the story of Rika, a girl who gets Unplugged just before the events of Reloaded. This is my first fanfic, so please be gentle with me :)


Twice Through The Looking Glass Written by Derek, July 2003 

Cool morning air buffeted the pair of trench-coated figures walking down the busy Vancouver street, driving autumn leaves past the thick black soles of their boots. Nobody paid them any attention – they looked almost normal here, where winter was coming in the Matrix, and everyone else was dressed thickly to avoid the cold.

To Neo, the cold was superficial, a mere lie told by his skin – he'd felt _real _cold, the aching chill of the surface, where even now the silvered, ruined clouds reflected back far more light than they allowed in, darkening and cooling every continent. During the last throes of its defeat, humanity had poisoned the skies with a reflective lead azide compound, a lethal stroke of genius. Of course, humanity had assumed that it would find a way to stem the clouds, to get rid of them once the war was won.

They didn't win the war, and now not even the machines could destroy that overbearing layer of altocirrus.

"The work of desperate men is not always sane," Morpheus had once said, when they were talking about it during a brief sojourn on the surface a month ago. The Nebechudnezzar had emerged from the vast drainage systems constructed by the machines for a glimpse of a Growing Field. Trinity and Morpheus had stood beside Neo as he slowly clambered up out of the belly of the ship, using a rarely-employed maintenance ladder. There had been silence while they watched it, and then they had gone back inside, back underground, where it was still warm. Neo never wanted to see a Field again, neat rows of shoe-box sized ruby globes glistening all the way to the horizon, each filled with the helpless shape of a human foetus, with the titanic Harvesters towering over them, occasionally pausing to pluck one of the globes for later insertion into the Matrix.

Even the incredible might of the machines was only barely enough to keep the glaciers at bay, which was why they had begun moving themselves underground, to stay away from the terrible slow power of the ice. Soon there would be no more machines above ground, and the glaciers would be the final victors of the war.

_"How did you do that? You moved like they do. I've never seen anyone move that fast before."_

_"Not fast enough."_

Her words still rang bell-clear in his mind. That whole day was enshrined at the center of Neo's memory, wrapped in the mental equivalent of cotton wool. He had saved her, and then she'd saved him. Dropped into a hurricane of war that spanned two universes and billions of lives, the only thing that made sense to Neo right now was their love, the way it felt when they held each other. Their unity was something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Here they were, Trinity far away, on another continent, but she was only ever a phone call away. Few long-distance relationships could ever be this good, and in that Neo found a small solace, for his heart was burdened with the unfelt sadness of an entire race.

Now they were walking away from the towering buildings, towards the edge of the suburbs that ringed this city, one of the great human cities, a thousand billion tons of bricks made of ones and zeroes. The houses grew smaller, until eventually the pair found themselves walking briskly into a street called Jefferson, it's name announced by a dull green metal board perched on a thin aluminium pole rimmed with flakes of shiny frost. That reminded Neo of the little shards of ice his hands had dislodge from the rim of his containment cell when he had been Unplugged from the prison he had spent thirty long years in, unaware of it's existence, and requiring it to survive, for no human could live for very long at thirty degrees below zero. For all his life up to that point, he had lived barely a foot away from hypothermia, protected only by a thick sheath of sticky, gelatinous fluid he had broken, torn through with his weak grasp, his entire body burning with glorious, stupendous pain.

And then the light, and darkness, and light again, a searing blue that felt like it was trying to tear his tender eyelids off. Outside the Matrix, everything had a slightly bluer quality – he had told Trinity this, one night, and she'd said that everyone who was Unplugged experienced that – it was a natural reaction of the light-sensitive ocular cells, which, never having been employed before, were still as fresh as those of a newborn baby. Neo had been surprised to learn that humans slowly became more colour-blind with age.

She'd snuggled into the hollow of his neck and murmured sleepily: "Matisse noticed it. He got a cataract in his left eye, and when the doctors removed it, he torched nearly all of his earlier paintings, because he couldn't believe the terrible colours he'd used to paint them. Think of it as a reminder of being human. This is the way a baby sees, so clearly. We are all children of the Matrix, no matter what our age. That's something we carry with us, always."

Human eyes are more sensitive to the blue wavelength of visible light, which meant that as their ocular cells died off, blue vision deteriated first, leaving Neo and Morpheus with a visibly green, ever-so-slightly murky view of the Matrix. He knew that his real eyes could see better than this, but as far as the machinery buried in his lower medulla oblongata was concerned, his eyes were thirty years old, and it biased his optical input to match that fact.

Only people born in the real world were entirely free of the machines. Every single person who was Unplugged would carry a part of the Matrix around with them for the rest of their life, in the form of a brain-machine interface woven so intricately into the brain of the Unplugged that it was inoperable, a tumour so well meshed with it's host tissue that there was no hope of ever removing it. Luckily it was passive when not connected to the slim metal spike carrying a bundle of optic fibres that fed it great gasps of data; otherwise the machines could have controlled them from a distance.

Dusk had fallen, and the pavements shone electrically in the glow of sparodic street lamps, their colours furthered sharpened by the crisp night air. Morpheus stopped walking and turned to look up at a cream two-storey ranch with a green roof that was almost black in the darkness. He squinted down the long, straight length of the street, empty of traffic but filled with little flattened yellow ovals of light.

"This is it. I wish they'd distribute the payphones a little bit more evenly in this damned city – this is the third time now that we've had to walk nearly six kilometers just to take a closer look at a potential. Once you're in the city proper, you can't swing a cat without hitting a payphone, but walk a few kilometers out, and wham, the world of telecommunications retreats indoors. Don't you just love the Matrix?" Morpheus said, grinning without any humour in his face.

Neo buried his hands deeper in his pockets. "Oh, like you wouldn't believe. I must love it if I spent thirty years here, right?"

"Logically, yes, emotionally, no. Let's stop the chitchat and get a move on – it's almost dinnertime on the Nebuchadnezzar, and my body will be hungry soon. Here's the Watcher," Morpheus said, handing Neo a tiny metal stud, a flattened bullet shape, meant only for watching, not killing. A day or two from now another person from the Nebacchudnezzar would stop here to replace it with a fresh one. All it did was gather data, serving as a comprehensive recording device for all Matrix data-flow in it's immediate vicinity for a certain period of time. The little devices were a godsend - virtually undetectable, since they didn't transmit any information at all, and tiny enough to hide almost anywhere.

Neo stepped up to a tall tree that grew in the front yard of the house and proceeded to climb it until he was almost level with the second storey, where he paused to replace a full Watcher pip with the new one that Morpheus had just given him. It had been lodged securely in a crack in the bark. He jumped lithely off the bough of the branch he was sitting on, his feet flattening not a single blade of frost-encrusted grass, lest someone searched the lawn for footprints later on.

Catching up with Morpheus, who had already started walking back the way they'd come, he handed over the old pip, pausing to look briefly over his shoulder at the warm light spilling out of their target's windows.

"Looks cosy, doesn't it? Like a real home." Squinting at Morpheus through the breeze that made his eyes water, he said, "Do you think we'll ever get to have something like that? A place we can truly call home, and not just a hide-out?" he said.

Stopping in mid-stride, Morpheus turned around. Neo could see that he was giving him a sharp look, even though his eyes were shrouded by his omni-present shades. "For some people, what might seem like a loving home is really more like the ninth circle of Hell. Let's get moving, it's freezing out here."

*

_Time marches on never ending, time keeps it's own time._

_Here we stand at the beginning,_

_An eagle passing us by, and I, I can dream for us all…_

Rika shoved the keyboard away. This was so _frust_rating! Every time she thought she'd gotten close to the truth, to knowing what it was, she landed up where she'd begun, back on the first square of the Emperor's chessboard.

Pulling off her headphones and shaking her hair to let it fall over her ears again where the thick foam pads of the Hitachi Soundmasters had been, she stood up, stretching to get rid of the stiffness four hours of typing had given her legs and back.

She'd laughed the first time she heard the question, that burning question with no answer at all – _What is the Matrix?_ Barely six months ago she'd heard someone say that for the first time, on some obscure East European IRC channel, but the person who'd said it hadn't wanted to talk. To this day, she could clearly remember the brief conversation she'd had with him or her, whoever it was:

**Blondie** What were you talking about, when you said "What is the matrix?"

**EON** To know the truth, you have to risk everything.

**Blondie** Hey, are you nuts?

**EON** You cannot imagine the truth, because you are part of it. It's all about perspective.

**Blondie** I don't know what you mean, EON.

**EON** Of course not.

**Blondie** What exactly are you talking about? The matrix? What, like in linear algebra? I know those. I studied them at NYU.

**EON** No, not that. All I will say is that the matrix is hidden in plain sight, the greatest deception of all, the greatest lie ever told. Maybe one day you will be able to understand. I must go now. Goodbye, Blondie.

**Blondie** Um, bye!

** User EON has signed off #deepmagic.**

After searching for days, she was still unable to find so much as a hint of the existence of the man or woman named 'EON'. According to the IRC server's logs, the username had never existed, which was odd. Maybe EON had hacked the logfiles, which was not at all a difficult thing to do. That wasn't what bothered Rika, though. What EON had said bothered her more. It was like a fishhook in her mind – she couldn't get rid of it, no matter how much she struggled to forget it, to do something useful.

Rika was well known in certain clandestine circles – on the East Coast alone, she was the hidden talent behind several major security breaches, some of them military. Although she had detected signs of monitoring and snooping around the servers and backbone networks that she had cracked, she felt secure in her own prodigious knowledge of those systems. Compared to her, those admins were ham-fisted Neanderthals. It would probably make them supremely angry if they found out that the person who could code circles around them was an eighteen year-old teenage girl, younger even than some of their own daughters.

Powered by Rika's wit and logic alone, her nimble fingers had prized open thirty large national banks, and she'd secured a limited shell account on a server in the basement of the Pentagon. Other, less experienced crackers were often told that the Pentagon was absolutely severed from any outside commercial networks – only truly proficient crackers discovered the truth of the matter, that the honeypot that surrounded it was in itself a gateway to a second, interior network, a concept developed by one of the anonymous geniuses who worked at the Pentagon. History would always be mute to his or her contribution, but such was the way of military intelligence.

What stung at her even more was that every time she logged into her shell on that server, the MOTD was always the same: _The Matrix has you._ After having gone to great lengths to change it, first editing the relevant files, then checking to see what processes were modifying them when she was logged out, she'd finally decided that whoever controlled the MOTD file was far more subtle than she could imagine. To all intents and purposes, the process that added that single, disturbing line to the file were invisible, an impossibility in a system constructed from binary laws more rigid and changeless than stone.

Padding gently across polished, fragrant stone floors to the kitchen, lest she awaken her sleeping father, she paused in front of the window. Through a slanted gap in the curtains she could see the part of their lawn that bordered the street, and for a moment she almost thought she saw someone running across it, vanishing in a flicker of movement, too fast to be human.

_You're seeing things again – too much time spent letting a monitor burn icons into your eyes every night, _she thought to herself, shivering and turning away just in time to see her sleepy father tramp down the corridor that led to the kitchen.

He towered in the doorframe, dishevelled pyjamas hanging loosely from his powerful frame.

"What are you doing up at this time of the night? You have school tomorrow, Rika." It wasn't a question – it was a statement. He sounded angry again. Things hadn't been going well down at the auto factory recently, and he tended to take it out on her. She'd heard him talking on the phone with that brash voice of his, things about union disputes, management crisis. Those were worrying words, coming from her father, who was the only breadwinner in their two-person household since her mother had succumbed to leukemia three long years ago.

"I was just drinking a glass of water, that's all." Sighing, she stepped past him and back to her bedroom. He halted her with a single, brawny hand.

"I'm not stupid, you know. I can see the glow from that computer screen of yours without even looking into your bedroom. You've been playing games again, haven't you? Haven't I _told _you not to play computer games late at night? Are you stupid?"

All she could do was hang her head and try to move away, but he held her firmly. Although he'd never hurt her, apart from one or two resounding smacks when she was very young, his bulk was still intimidating.

"Now I want you to get into that bed. Don't even touch your computer again until I say you can. Tomorrow I'm taking out it's power plug before I leave for work, and if you so much as mention it before next month you're grounded."

"Aw, Dad…"

"I _said _go to bed! Now! We'll talk more in the morning!"

Finally he let her go, to run to her room and fall into her bed, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. _He's so unfair! _she thought, as she angrily lay in bed thinking of a way to get out of her impromptu computer ban. For a few minutes, she simply lay there, fuming, until she noticed that something had changed.

Jade green letters on a background of plain black hovered at the top of her screen.

Ø **You are not alone, Rika. We are here to help you.**

Quick as a flash, she was sitting on her chair and typing,

Ø **Who are you?**

A momentary pause, and then a reply:

Ø **We're on your side, and would like to meet. Sandy's Sandwich Bar, tomorrow, 9.05AM. You will never be able to meet us again. They're coming for you, and tomorrow they will find you, before noon. Don't go to school – they're waiting for you there. Goodbye.**

Before she could type a reply, the screen went blank, and then the AMIBIOS Energy-Star compliance logo popped up, and it began to reboot. _Weird, very weird. How did they take over my box like that? They must be supremely good. This thing is patched seven different ways from Sunday – nobody could crack it. _She readied her fingers, preparing for a salvo of details interrogations of her computer's operating system to try and determine what they had done to it, until she saw her father's bedroom light flick on, illuminating the bottom of her door. Hastily switching off her computer, she jumped onto her bed and arranged herself under the blankets, just before her father's head peeked from behind her door. He didn't say anything, only silently closed her door after staring at her for a few seconds. After that, sleep hit her almost before the pillow hit her head, tension translating into exhaustion.

*

_I hope I'm in a better state,_

_when here and now crumbles and falls,_

_and you, you make worlds collide._

_I knew you'd come knocking one day,_

_unannounced like a thief in the night._

"Damnit, Morpheus, I don't think she's going to make it. She's got fifteen minutes, and she's still asleep, according to the pip. How does she expect t make it here in fifteen minutes?"

Morpheus picked up his second thick, juicy pastrami sandwich of the morning, examined it, then said: "One of the most peculiar pains I can imagine is to stare at this sandwich and know that I'll never eat a real one, ever. How I wish we had domesticated animals in Zion."

"All in all, I think the animals are happy that we haven't domesticated them in Zion. I know the vegetarians are."

"There _are _no animals to domesticate, Neo. None survived the War."

"Well, obviously. Everyone on Zion is essentially forced to go vegan, unless you like the taste of liquified human. Some people say they've eaten the stuff the Harvesters pump into the babies in the Matrix. Apparently it's quite filling." Staring down at the useless sandwich, purchased only for appearances, he continued, "They also said it tastes like mustard with just a dash of spinach."

"Now, Neo, no need to get vindictive. I'm sure she'll get here in time."

Neo's eyes glinted behind his shades, although Morpheus couldn't see it. "For our next potential, could you be a little less heavy on the mysteriousness? I bet you shy off half of them just by your tone of voice when you type those cryptic little messages of yours!"

"Don't shoot the messenger, Neo. Why don't you try one of these sandwiches? They really are very good."

"I am the One, Morpheus. Biting into one of those for me is like biting into a disk drive."

"Fine, fine. I'll just have one for you." Waving his hand, Morpheus ushered the bored, flourescently dressed waitress to their table, and proceeded to give her their order. They sat on a small promenade that jutted out into the central aisle of a large shopping mall that their potential frequented. Public places were dangerous to stay in for long periods of time, but it was worth it on this occasion. Within fifteen minutes, Rika would either arrive or stand them up. Inside Morpheus' left inside trenchcoat pocket lurked two pills, one containing a simple anaesthetic, the other something decidedly more complex – part of a search program dedicated to finding bodies in the Matrix.

*

_Where do we go from here?_

_Time ain't nothing but time._

_I now have no fear of my feelings, and no more tears to cry._

_Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow means nothing at all,_

_if we don't heed the light, when today places it's call,_

_and morning, morning will never be the same._

_Now I won't make the same mistake,_

_time and time again._

His voice seemed to fill all of space and time, squeezing powerfully.

"GET UP! You're going to be late for school! Get UP!"

Groggy as hell, but still angry from the night before, Rika savagely tore the sheets off her body, stood up, and began to pack her bag. Almost before she finished reading the time on her alarm clock, panic struck her.

_8.53_

Heart racing, she jammed a sweater into her little Pokemon bag, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of pants, and raced across the house, rushing out of the door, where her astonished father barely got in two words before she was sprinting down the street, towards the distant figure of the mall, a set of God's whitest Lego blocks sprawling across the landscape four streets away.

Jarred as they were from deep sleep, her legs worked surprisingly well, pistoning rapidly to get her across the neighbourhood. First she passed Jefferson Street, then Adams Street, and finally she curved into the sloping street that contained most of the Amelia Park shopping mall, going so quickly that she had to briefly run across the pavement on the other side then straighten out again. Lungs filled with fire and phlegm, she made it to the square glass door, ripping it open with all her strength and dashing inside.

*

"Well, looks like our girl had a change of heart. Look, here she comes. Is everything ready?" Morpheus asked, gazing down the aisle at the hurrying figure of Rika, who had not even had a chance to comb her thin black hair before leaving her home.

"Yeah. She ran all the way here? Shit, was she on the track team or something?"

"Oddly enough, no, now that you ask. That's a three-kilometer sprint she just did – I know exactly how far away her house is from here. You know, most runners can't keep that pace up for more than a kilometer or two. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Neo scratched his chin, then looked away from the harried figure of Rika, now almost upon them, and said: "Well, other people have realized the true nature of their bodies before. It wouldn't be so unusual."


End file.
